How many things must have been astir in his mind when he spoke those words of Pompey! In the next sentence he tells the people of his own danger. He has taken care of their safety; it is for them to take care of his.[208] But they, these Quirites, these Roman citizens, these masters of the world, by whom everything was supposed to be governed, could take care of no one; certainly not of themselves, as certainly not of another. They could only vote, now this way and now that, as somebody might tell them, or more probably as somebody might pay them. Pompey was coming home, and would soon be the favorite. Cicero must have felt that he had deserved much of Pompey, but was by no means sure that the debt of gratitude would be paid.
Now we come to the fourth or last Catiline oration, which was made to the Senate, convened on the 5th of December with the purpose of deciding the fate of the leading conspirators who were held in custody. We learn to what purport were three of the speeches made during this debate--those of Cæsar and of Cato and of Cicero. The first two are given to us by Sallust, but we can hardly think that we have the exact words. The Cæsarean spirit which induced Sallust to ignore altogether the words of Cicero would have induced him to give his own representation of the other two, even though we were to suppose that he had been able to have them taken down by short-hand writers--Cicero's words, we have no doubt, with such polishing as may have been added to the short-hand writers' notes by Tiro, his slave and secretary. The three are compatible each with the other, and we are entitled to believe that we know the line of argument used by the three orators.